May, 2008

Doudou Diene is writing a report will ultimately be presented to the U.N.'s Human Rights Council on signs of American internal injustice. Some members of the council, such as Iran and Cuba, are human-rights abusers that are deeply critical of U.S. intervention in their affairs, and there's ample reason to worry that these countries will use Diene's report as a justification for ignoring pressure to reform. On the other hand, if the U.S. is going to demand the monitoring of other countries, it's going to have to accept the same treatment at home. It won't hurt us to look at ourselves, and our real and continuing problems with racism, in the mirror held up by the international community.

"Common sense and the Scriptures," argues Sen. Tom Coburn, "show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor's possessions. Spending other people's money is not compassionate." He states a common view: that compassion is a private virtue, not a public one, and that religious conscience concerns the former and not the latter. It is true that Jesus was not a political activist; he joined no party and issued no Contract With the Roman Empire. But it is a stretch to interpret his personal challenge to the rich young ruler as a biblical foundation for libertarianism.

Authorities went too far when they raided Agriprocessors, an Iowa meatpacking company. Typically illegal imimigrant workers face civil deportation proceedings. But this case was more drastic: workers faced criminal charges such as identity theft. In a matter of days, nearly 300 immigrants accepted a plea bargain. Most agreed to spend five months in jail and then be deported. Foul, cried the ACLU of Iowa, arguing that lawyers representing 10 or more detainees lacked sufficient time to sort out relevant details of criminal and immigration law. This rush to justice does little to solve the nation's illegal immigration woes.

A major and an unusual event took place earlier today uniting people from all major religions of the world. Look at this list of diverse nations that agreed on that one thing: US (Western Christianity), Russia (Eastern Christianity), China (Buddhism/atheism), India (Hinduism), Pakistan (Islam), and Israel (Judaism). Any lucky guesses what brought the disparate parties together? I am not talking about prospects of world peace, abolition of poverty or God revealing Himself to all humanity. I am talking about little flying things that go by the ‘cute’ name of bomblets.

The recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on the meatpacking facility in Postville, IA and the threat of subsequent raids elsewhere in Iowa offend the conscience of many people. This is especially true for people of faith who look to their scriptures for guidance. The moral heart of the Abrahamic faiths is the command to love one's neighbor, an injunction articulated first in Leviticus 19:18 and quoted seven times in the New Testament. Jesus and many rabbinic authorities of his time held this command, together with the command to love God, as the highest moral principle and the essence of religious law. The golden rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," a core tenet of secular ethics, expresses the same principle.

The climate change bill that senators are to begin debating next week is a hugely important signal of intent on behalf of U.S. legislators. Yes, negotiations could still alter the legislation. But the bill's core proposition is correct: Unless the United States radically reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, along with other major emitters, the damage to the climate will be irreversible. Radical reduction is unlikely to happen through voluntary action alone.

If there's one issue that epitomizes the culture wars that have so deeply divided American politics over the last eight years, it's abortion. That's why those who benefited most from those wars are desperate to revive abortion's single-issue virulence in this presidential cycle. Now, because of Sen. Barack Obama's perceived problems with blue-collar Catholic voters in the late Democratic primaries, some on the right think they see an opportunity to hammer once more on the abortion wedge. Their most public target is Kansas' second-term governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who many believe is the front-runner for the vice presidential slot if Obama secures the nomination.

Will the food crisis that is menacing the lives of millions ease up — or grow worse over time? The answer may be both. The recent rise in food prices has largely been caused by temporary problems like drought in Australia, Ukraine and elsewhere. Though the need for huge rescue operations is urgent, the present acute crisis will eventually end. But underlying it is a basic problem that will only intensify unless we recognize it and try to remedy it.

What's the world's greatest moral challenge, as judged by its capacity to inflict human tragedy? It is not, I think, global warming, whose effects -- if they become as grim as predicted -- will occur over many years and provide societies time to adapt. A case can be made for preventing nuclear proliferation, which threatens untold deaths and a collapse of the world economy. But the most urgent present moral challenge, I submit, is the most obvious: global poverty.

President Bush opposes a new G.I. Bill of Rights. He worries that if the traditional path to college for service members since World War II is improved and expanded for the post-9/11 generation, too many people will take it. He is wrong, but at least he is consistent. So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.

President Bush announced plans this month to spend an additional $770 million on food assistance to poor countries, increasing total US food aid to $2.6 billion. The president's acknowledgement of the importance of buying local products is a significant first step in reforming American food aid. The United States could have a much greater impact on global hunger, however, were policies directed at recipients and not American constituencies. The effect of aid could be greatly multiplied if it focused even more on assisting communities in producing and distributing local goods. Otherwise food aid becomes more an act of charity than sustainable development practice.

Call someone anti-immigrant for opposing public services for non-citizens, and chances are you'll be corrected. It's anti-illegal-immigrant, you'll be told, not anti-immigrant. To some extent, that's true. But the arcane rules of the new economic stimulus package, which keep tax rebates from going to many legal residents and even citizens, show that the realities of immigration policy are more complicated, and more hostile to the foreign born, than such an answer implies.

The Farm Bill certainly should be better. It should include more reform on the commodity titles during this era of high prices for wheat, corn, and soybeans, and use savings from commodity reforms to provide additional support for nutrition, conservation, and healthy food, especially for America's 40 million poor. But there is no question that the bill is better than the veto option proposed by the president. By using his veto pen, President Bush wanted to extend the existing, flawed, and out-of-date 2002 farm bill into the future.

On Memorial Day, the nation will honor those who have given their lives in service to their country, including the more than 4,500 men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. But the nearly 37,000 who have been wounded in those wars often remain in the shadows. Even less attention goes to those suffering from invisible wounds. Nearly 20% of servicemembers who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression; only half have sought treatment, according to a survey released last month by the RAND Corp., a non-profit think tank.

Children who are confined to adult jails are at greater risk of being raped, battered or pushed to suicide. They also are more likely to become violent criminals than children handled through the juvenile justice system. When Congress reauthorizes the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, it should press the states to end this barbaric practice. The juvenile justice law provides federal aid to states that agree to humanize their often Dickensian systems — and to refrain from placing children in adult jails. The bargain worked well enough until the 1990s, when there was an outbreak of hysteria about so-called super predators and an adolescent crime wave that never materialized.
States classified ever larger numbers of young offenders as adults. Today, laws in more than 40 states permit adult courts to try children as young as 14.

The Evangelical pastor, John Hagee, has spent a career preaching and writing that the Catholic Church is the “Whore of Babylon” as found in the Book of Revelations. Understandably, Catholics find this rant offensive. Hagee recently clarified to Catholics that our church is the whore only some of the time. That’s not an apology. Hagee wrote to his fellow McCain supporter, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, that the phrase “whore of Babylon” is not “synonymous with the Catholic Church.” He intended it only to refer to “the Crusades and the Inquisition” and that identification of Catholicism with “the apostate church” (Matt. 24:10-12) and the “great whore” (Rev. 17:1ff.) constitutes “a rhetorical device long employed in anti-Catholic literature and commentary.” No where does he retract the virulent anti-Catholic bigotry of his several books such as From Daniel to Doomsday (1999), Jerusalem Countdown (2005) and the earlier work, “Should Christians Support Israel?”(1987), which calls Catholicism a “Godless theology of hate.”

It is the season of commencement speeches. High schools and colleges near and far are celebrating their graduates by hosting celebrity speechmakers. We listen for sound bites from the Bills – Clinton, Cosby, and Gates – along with CEOs and novelists, college presidents, and politicians. Most of their talks inspire, but many have also adopted an underlying message that links education, graduation, and material success. It's a message that unwittingly reduces the worth of an education to the expected wages it can bring. It sees tuition not as a ticket to a liberated mind but as a down payment on future income. In our excitement for the graduates, we've put the emphasis in the wrong place.

Does this sound familiar? Muslim men are stripped in front of female guards and sexually humiliated. A prisoner is made to wear a dog’s collar and leash, another is hooded with women’s underwear. Others are shackled in stress positions for hours, held in isolation for months, and threatened with attack dogs. You might think we are talking about that one cell block in Abu Ghraib, where President Bush wants the world to believe a few rogue soldiers dreamed up a sadistic nightmare. These atrocities were committed in the interrogation centers in American military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And they were not revealed by Red Cross officials, human rights activists, Democrats in Congress or others the administration writes off as soft-on-terror.

Muhammad Yunus has already changed the world once, which is why he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. By creating the Grameen Bank and using microfinance to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh, he demonstrated a transformational model for eliminating poverty. Now he's playing an even bigger game: Yunus wants to transform capitalism. What is his plan? To attack poverty by enlisting companies whose mission is to change the world.

When he was told that some in the Army were dismissive of press reports on the mistreatment of patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, according to one witness, grew "very, very quiet." Within two weeks, the Walter Reed commander was out of a job. This kind of decisive silence has been employed by Gates to good effect in scandals ranging from misdirected nuclear parts to the cremation of fallen American soldiers and pets at the same facility.

There is a neglect that is shockingly permissible against immigrants nationwide. The country's 300 immigrant detention centers, including facilities in Los Angeles, have voluntary healthcare standards, not mandatory ones. Because of that, immigrants who are detained at the centers -- some are in the country illegally; others are held because of clerical errors or while they wait for their asylum claims to be heard -- often are subjected to indifference, even cruelty.

Can religion have a place in the legal systems of the West? Unlike the United States or France, England has an established, state religion which the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams heads. Yet the country grows ever more secular. The exception is the Muslim minority, segments of which are growing ever more religious. Williams said he sought to "tease out" the broader issues concerning the "rights of religious groups within a secular state."

With food prices and farm incomes soaring, this should be an historic moment to junk a gimmick-laden and wasteful system of agricultural subsidies. But both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have lined up behind a five-year, $300 billion farm bill that changes little. After months of work, the bill has done its job of dribbling reform across an expanse of subsidies and price props. The timing couldn't be more loony as a worldwide food shortage deepens and the same leaders debate wider aid programs to answer global hunger.

We are now several months into the global food crisis, which is a much bigger deal than the subprime meltdown for most people in the world. Food prices have almost doubled in three years, threatening to push 100 million people into absolute poverty, undoing much of the development progress of the past few years. The new hunger has triggered riots from Haiti to Egypt to Ethiopia, threatening political stability; it has conjured up a raft of protectionist policies, threatening globalization. And yet the response to this crisis from governments the world over has been lackadaisical or worse.

A deal to resolve the Tibet question is still attainable. The Dalai Lama would have to put aside claims to vast areas outside the present “Tibet Autonomous Region,” and he would have to accept much less political autonomy than he wants. China would have to ease religious controls and allow the Dalai Lama to return as a spiritual leader. Most important, Beijing would have to end Han Chinese migration to all Tibetan areas, to preserve their Tibetan character.